by Tim Kizer
When he came back from the bar, his mother was still alive. She was lying in bed, her pale face glistening with sweat. She could hardly speak, her voice was hoarse and low.
"I’m dying," she said, panting. "My God... I’m... dying."
Then his sister dropped by and called the ambulance. The doctors at the hospital were unable to save Wendy’s life. She died at twenty minutes to midnight.
2.
Richard again had dinner at Tina's place. He did not care if people started spreading rumors that he was fucking his neighbor. When he was about to leave, Ronnie, Tina's ten-year-old son, said, "Mom, you forgot to ask for garden scissors."
"Oh, yeah, I did." Tina laughed. "I told him to remind me if I forgot to ask you for garden scissors. We were going to trim the bushes today, so I started looking for our garden scissors. I looked everywhere, but couldn’t find them. I was wondering if you could lend us yours. Just for a day."
Richard said okay, and took Tina to his house to get the scissors. After seating Tina in the living room, he headed for the garage, where he kept all his garden tools. He searched every shelf and cabinet in the garage, but did not find the scissors.
"Let me check the basement,” he said to Tina. “They must be there. I’ll be back in ten minutes."
Then, whistling ‘Pretty Woman,’ Richard entered the basement.
First he examined the shelves, which had so much stuff on them he was sure he would find the damn garden scissors there. To his disappointment, there were no garden scissors on the shelves. Then he moved on to the corner farthest from the stairs. Even though it was at least a year since he had last been in that part of the basement, he decided to check it anyway, knowing that things sometimes ended up in places you least expected them to be. As he rummaged through storage boxes, a mouse ran out from behind the footlocker and scampered past his feet. Intent on tracking the rodent down, Richard squatted and began to scan the place.
After half a minute, he saw something interesting. Under the old coffee table by the wall there was a black statuette about ten inches tall. The statuette looked very odd. Curious about what it was, Richard took it out from under the table and scrutinized it.
The statuette was of a chubby man sitting in the lotus position, who had large sunken eyes and long fingers. His mouth was open, and there were big round earrings in his ears. Richard reckoned that the guy was some kind of Indian god. Tourists loved shit like this. As far as he could tell, the statuette was made of bronze. It was pretty heavy.
Richard wanted to know one thing: how had this piece of kitsch gotten in his basement? It belonged neither to him nor to Mary.
Well, it could belong to Mary, couldn’t it? It had already been established that there was a lot he didn’t know about her.
When he put the statuette on the floor, his attention shifted to what he believed was as amusing and weird as the idol with crossed legs. He saw several slices of cheese and ham next to where the statuette had been. He hadn't noticed the food earlier because he had been distracted by the idol. As he stared at the cheese, he thought about the mouse that had just run by. Of course you would have mice if you had cheese and ham lying around on the basement floor. Judging by the condition of the food, it had been brought here no more than two days ago.
Richard picked up a piece of cheese and smelled at it. For a moment he considered tasting the cheese.
It looked like someone had been feeding the idol. Someone had been coming to his basement and giving the damn statuette food!
Who the hell was it? And why had he or she been doing this?
Richard stepped up to the idol and fixed his eyes on its head. He asked himself if he should smash the statuette to pieces. The problem was that it could take more effort than he was willing to expend right now. He decided to leave the idol alone. After all, it was just a piece of metal.
It’s not like it’s going to bite me or anything like that, he thought.
Mice. He had mice in his house.
The idol. It must be their god. The avengers' god. There was no doubt now. The avengers had found him.
They had found him.
Richard returned to the living room and informed Tina that he had been unable to locate the garden scissors.
“I guess I’ll have to buy new ones,” Tina said.
CHAPTER 17
1.
In childhood, when he was in bed at night, Bob liked to cover his entire body, including his head, with his blanket, immersing himself in pitch black darkness. He often permitted her to get under the blanket together with him. It was very quiet and dark under the blanket; they could hear each other breathing. Bob would switch on his pocket flashlight to illuminate their "cave." He would move the flashlight beam from side to side, up and down, shapeless shadows sliding across his face. But how dark it was there before Bob turned on his flashlight! The darkness was mystical. Impenetrable darkness. Darkness you could sense physically. It was this kind of darkness that surrounded Mary that Saturday night while she was buried in the earth.
When she came to, she couldn't understand where she was for a while. She was lying on her stomach, her left cheek resting on the ground, her arms stretched along her body. She had a terrible headache, her right side and hip were sore. Then Mary remembered Richard running after her and yelling at her. She remembered trying to jump off a bridge. Then she heard a noise above her. It sounded like a shovel scooping up soil. A moment later, Mary felt something crumbly and cold—most likely soil—fall on her back. Then something crumbly and cold landed on her legs. Then on her back again. Now Mary was sure that it was soil.
Richard was burying her! She had to keep stock-still because he obviously thought she was dead. Even if a huge disgusting spider climbed onto her body, she would have to lie motionless, like a corpse, barely breathing. She was terrified of spiders. And centipedes, too. There must be hundreds of centipedes around here.
He would bury her and leave. Then she would need to get out of the grave. Mary believed she would have no problem doing it. The hole, as far as she could tell, was quite shallow. She was going to be covered by no more than a foot of earth. According to her estimates, she could dig herself out in under fifteen minutes. It would take Richard fifteen—twenty minutes to fill the hole with soil. She would start digging herself out about ten minutes after he finished filling the grave. In total, she would spend approximately forty five minutes underground. Mary was confident she was going to survive this. She remembered reading a story about a boy in Indiana who had been completely buried in a sand dune for three hours and survived.
The good thing was, she was lying with her face down. She must raise her head a little so that there would be some empty space between her face and the ground—an air chamber of sorts. She would do it when she was covered by a layer of soil in order to prevent Richard from seeing her move. The good thing was it was dark now, and Richard was busy burying a dead body. Her dead body!
On the bright side, she was in a better position than those buried alive in a coffin: she didn't have to deal with the problem of getting out of a coffin.
2.
Out of boredom, Richard started listening to the conversation between the two middle-aged women who were sitting at the next table. They were talking about the ear-chopping serial killer.
"I heard he wears black pants, a black shirt, and a mask,” one of the women said. “He kills and then rapes."
"Maybe he first rapes and then kills?" the other woman replied.
Staring at his ice cream, Richard said, "I’ll never see her again."
He thought melancholically that he must have spoken this phrase a hundred times already.
"What are you going to do now?" Kathy asked. "Are you afraid of loneliness?"
"No, I've gotten used to it."
They exchanged glances. Richard touched Kathy's hand.
"Loneliness is a serious problem. It can lead to depression, you know. Can I help you somehow?"
"Of course, you can, Ka
thy. By being my friend." He looked into her eyes.
"I'll do my best."
"Have you talked to Norris yet?"
"Yes. He said that he was in your house."
"What for?"
"He needed a piece of your wife's clothing.”
“Wasn’t he supposed to ask for my permission? And how did he get in?” Richard felt his blood begin to boil with fury.
“He opened the door with a master key. He wants to apologize for entering your house without permission."
"And what did he need Mary's clothing for?"
"It’s a funny story." Kathy giggled. "A psychic told him to bring it.”
"A psychic?"
"Three months ago, Steve and another detective visited a psychic in Seattle. I forget her name. They asked her to help them find a fugitive killer. The interesting thing is, it worked. That killer was exactly where the psychic said he was.”
“I can’t believe their boss let them do that.”
“They didn’t tell the boss. They used their own money to pay the psychic.” She scooped some ice cream from her bowl and put it in her mouth.
“So Norris thought that lady could tell him where Mary was?”
“Yes.” Kathy nodded.
“Well, I guess he’s not as smart as I thought he was.”
“You don’t believe in psychics?”
“No. Do you?”
“I think there are people who have paranormal abilities. There are a lot of things that science can’t explain.”
“What did the psychic tell him?”
“Steve ended up not going to her. He was informed that your wife's body was found, so he canceled."
"How long has Norris been a cop?"
"Ten years. He used to work in New York. He moved to Everett about four months ago."
"And he managed to charm you in just four months?"
"He’s a nice and decent man. He’s dedicated to his work."
"I noticed that."
"Are you going to his birthday party? Steve said that he really wants you to come. He knows he was a little rough on you, so now he’s trying to make it up to you."
"I told him I wasn't mad at him."
"So you’re going to the party?”
“Are you going?”
“Yes.”
"Okay, you’ve persuaded me. I’ll go."
3.
She didn't know how long it had taken her to get out of the grave. It crossed her mind that she must have looked like one of those zombies crawling out of their tombs in horror movies. She was in shock. She was on the verge of panic.
It appeared that Richard knew everything. He knew it the whole time! They had been plotting to kill him, and he had somehow found that out.
Don. Richard knew about him. Somehow her husband had found out about their plan. What was she going to do now?
What would Richard do if he learned that she was alive?
When Mary shook the soil off her clothes and out of her hair, a dreadful thought occurred to her: Richard could come back. And she took off running. She ran as fast as she could, away from that place. She was scared, but her fear wasn't growing anymore. After about half an hour—maybe more, she didn’t trust her internal clock at the moment—Mary spotted a road ahead of her.
When she got to the road, she spent a minute deciding which way to go. The moonlight made the dark woods less frightening. She picked a direction and started walking. She wondered how far she was from the bridge she had jumped from. She walked for one and a half hours or so before she reached the city of Granite Falls.
Since her wallet was in her purse, which she had dropped while fighting Richard, she decided not to call a cab. She could obtain a few hundred dollars by pawning her diamond wedding ring and diamond earrings, but she didn’t know of any pawn shop in the Everett area that was open twenty four hours a day. She spent the night on a bench by a fast food restaurant. In the morning, she hitched a ride to Everett with a feisty seventy-one-year-old man named Doyle. The pawn shop paid her four hundred dollars for the ring and the earrings. She used some of that money to rent a room at a motel in Lynnwood, where she stayed for two days. On Tuesday, she went to Don’s place and told her lover about what had happened to her.
Why hadn't she immediately contacted Don? Why had she spent two days at a motel?
Because she had been scared.
It became clear to her that conspiring to kill Richard had been a terrible mistake. It occurred to her that she could ruin her life if she kept seeing Don. She wanted to forget him. But it turned out that she loved Don too much to abandon him.
While she was at the motel, she thought a lot about Richard, who had shown a side of him she had never suspected was there. She realized that she was afraid of him. The man had buried her in the fucking woods! Instead of calling the police, Richard had hidden her body in the ground under the cover of night. That wasn’t what honest people did, was it?
That was what serial killers like John Wayne Gacy did.
Perhaps he would have killed her himself if she hadn’t lost consciousness after falling from the bridge. Mary had never thought Richard could be so wicked. She suddenly realized that she didn't know her husband, that she had been wrong about him this whole time.
She had been terribly scared back then. And that damn gun... It was Don who had given it to her—just in case. The funny thing was that the pistol hadn't helped her when the time had come. Had she been ready to shoot Richard at that moment? Yes, she had. She would have done it without hesitation because her life had been at stake, and you only live once, dammit.
4.
After she checked into the motel, she asked herself how Richard had caught wind of Don’s and her plan to kill him. Most likely it was that John guy, although she didn’t believe John was his real name. John had somehow found out that she was sleeping with Don and decided to make some money by blackmailing her. He had called her cellphone two weeks earlier and demanded two thousand dollars for his silence. She told Don about it, and he advised her to pay nothing. When John called her, she informed him that she refused to pay.
"I'll wait," John replied.
He called six days later, and Mary, following Don’s new instructions, told him that she would pay the two thousand he was asking for. The next day, she met with John and handed him forty fifty-dollar bills.
However, it appeared that John had contacted Richard, too. He must have told Richard about Don—after Richard had paid him, of course. Perhaps Richard had planted a bug in Don’s house. He might have even attached a GPS tracking device to Don’s car.
She had done as Don had told her.
Her beloved Don. Her handsome blue-eyed Don.
They had met under interesting circumstances, which began to seem suspicious to her only two weeks later. It happened in the parking lot of a grocery store in Mill Creek. When she walked up to her car, the bag with her purchases in her right hand, she found, to her disappointment, that the left front tire was flat.
"Flat tire?" a man’s voice said.
Mary turned around and saw a tall guy in his late twenties. His beautiful blue eyes immediately caught her attention. It was Don.
“Do you know how to change a flat tire?” he asked.
Mary said that she had no idea how to do it.
"I could help you," Don said.
“That would be great,” she replied.
Don squatted in front of the flat tire, looked it over carefully, patted it with his hand, and then asked, “Do you have a spare?"
Mary said that she did.
After Don replaced the tire, she asked him how she could repay him for the service he had provided. Don told her that she could buy him an ice cream at the ice cream parlor around the corner.
“Are you free right now?” he asked.
“Yes, I am,” she said.
What raised her suspicions?
The tire had not deflated by accident.
The guy at the tire store where she went after
her encounter with Don told her that the tire appeared to have been punctured with a knife. Someone had sabotaged her tire. It took Mary a while to figure out who it was.
Don.
Don had cut the tire so that it would become flat and he would have an opportunity to help her. He was trying to find a way to ask her out on a date, you see! He was in love with her, that was the conclusion she drew. He loved her very much. She felt safe with him; he was strong and decisive. She knew he would always be there for her.
CHAPTER 18
1.
Norris’s cousin, whose name was John Welles, lived in the southern part of Bellevue, in a densely treed neighborhood full of million-dollar mansions. On the way to Welles’s place, Richard pondered the question: ‘Where is he going to move if he decides to leave Washington?’ At the moment, San Diego was the main candidate. It was a fairly big city, it had great weather all year round, and it was close to the Mexican border.
Frankly, he did not want to move. He was tired of running away from the avengers. Besides, he was not sure it was the avengers who had brought the statuette to his basement.
When he was eighty feet from Welles’s house, Richard pulled over to the side of the road behind a string of parked cars, which he assumed belonged to other guests. He got out of his Acura and headed for Welles’s driveway. In his left hand, he held the box containing his gift for Norris—a six-ounce pewter flask. As he passed a gray Dodge Charger, he heard a groan. He kept walking.
"Help."
A woman's voice.
Or was it his imagination?
Through the tall shrubs lining the street, Richard could see the facade of Norris’s cousin’s mansion illuminated by outdoor lights. He could hear the music played in the house. He slowed down his pace, and then stopped.
"Help!"
Richard's stomach sank. He thought he recognized the voice. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was Kathy. He rushed toward the bushes from which the cries were coming.